Wednesday, June 1, 2011

War is in our genes

I've got a new interview up at The War Project. I interviewed Staff Sgt. Jason Deckman, a combat engineer who's been deployed to Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Iraq twice and is heading to Afghanistan for his sixth deployment.

Every time we went out that serpentine, where you’re going from inside that protective area to you’re outside the wire, in that little transition, there was very few times that I didn’t have that little quick catch in my chest, where your heart kind of skips a beat, and you think to yourself, OK, here we go. It’s that little adrenaline rush.

There was very few missions that I would roll up to the gate and didn’t have that catch, because it was telling myself, OK, now you’re in combat, and now there is someone trying to kill you.

In a new post my Forbes blog, I talk about why I created The War Project.

At the fundraiser, I met a young man who had accidentally driven a Humvee over an IED in Iraq.

He was really a great kid. I interviewed him, and we hit it off. He had been burned over most of his body when the IED had detonated and he was trapped in the vehicle. He’d endured countless surgeries. When I met him, he had what turned out to be a breast implant embedded under the skin covering his skull. It was stretching the skin so that skin could get graphed onto other scarred parts of his body. I joked that when he was done with the implant, he could donate it to a stripper who had only one breast implant and was in need. He laughed.

ABOUT

I'm a freelance journalist. I've written for Details, Harper's Bazaar, Newsweek,
Radar, Women's Health, Salon, Slate, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, The LA Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, Variety, Inc., Esquire, The Atlantic, and I'm a Forbes contributor. In 2008, TIME named me one of the best bloggers of the year. I've appeared on CNN, NPR, and "Politically Incorrect." [EMAIL]